Glimpses
by Serious Earth
Summary: Brief little snippets of what goes on behind closed doors.
1. Work

He's out of his suit right now, he's exposed, his skin is already cracking and shriveling and glazing against the sliver of heat that's still wafting about the room, he can't stay like this for long, oh no, not for very long at _all_ , but right now, he doesn't care.

In fact, he doesn't even _notice_.

He's too busy looking at her, his hand pressed to the bulky glass of her prison, her tubular, complicated little cage, as if by holding it there the barrier between them might dissolve into nothing and she will be free again, free to _dance_ again, to twirl and swirl and slide and hop and smile that ditzy, innocent little smile and look at him with her shining, hopeful eyes.

He can almost hear her giggle, almost feel her soft, hot breath upon the nape of his neck, almost feel her delicate brush of a touch, hear her beckon him, ever so earnestly, to come back to bed, to stop hounding himself like that, to give himself a break, to _her_ a break, to notice her, to just _notice_ me, Victor, do I really have to beg, is that what I have to do? Do I really have to _beg_ you to leave your work at the laboratory and actually _notice_ me when you're home, to actually _acknowledge_ your wife's existence when you're with her in the bedroom? I mean, for God's sake, when I married you, I never knew I'd have to share your affection with a bunch of test tubes! You know, when a normal man decides to have an affair he at least has the common decency to do his cheating elsewhere, and to not bring his mistress _home_ with him, and make his wife feel like a goddamn ghost inside her own house! I mean, are you really that _oblivious_ , Victor? Are you really so in love with that damn lab coat that your own _wife_ has be put on the back-burner?

Are you really that _obsessed_ , Victor?

Because that's what it seems like, you know!

It seems like you have this ugly, horrible little _obsession,_ and the worst part is, you don't even seem to know it!

A tear slides down his cheek as he hears this, hears this in his mind. It leaves a shiny, skim-like snail-trail as it courses down the soft lump of his chin. It freezes, and becomes an icicle, small and fragile and crystalline, that dangles from his face like a clear, white hair. He flicks it off with the heel of his hand; it shatters into a thousand pieces when it hits the hard steel of the floor.

The room is blue. Billows of blue smoke curl through the vents, hazing and blurring the red industrial lights on the ceiling, making them look like pixel blemishes in the thick of the room's drifting vapor. The wheeze of distant, thrumming machinery is heard but not acknowledged, just like how the bodies, the human subjects, the decaying corpses barley preserved in their own chemicals, which lay like a string of frost-bitten soldiers in the back of the room, are momentarily forgotten, in this moment of respite.

In this moment of mourning, of reaching and failing, of stargazing at her rare, overwhelming beauty, which makes his heart feel as if it's a lead balloon that's somehow filling _up_.

Her face is smooth, Goddess-clean. Her hair floats above her shoulders like a loose curtain in a thin breeze. She looks an angel that never got to heaven; an angel suspended in a cold, lonely purgatory where the only noise is the whir of loud equipment and the only light is relentless blue, blue, blue.

Another tear slides down his cheek.

 _Dance with me, Victor._

 _..._

 _What?_

 _You know, like we used to? When we were first dating? When you still_ cared _? Or have you forgotten about that, too?_

 _Oh. Yeah. No, of course not, I remember. It's just that... well, look, Nora, I'm close, ok? I'm on the verge of something here. I know it. I can_ feel _it. Just give me a little more time. Then I promise you, once I have it, once I finally_ have _it, I'll use up all my vacation days, and I'll spend every minute of them on you, ok, babe? Every single_ minute _._

His hand falls from the glass like a limp tongue. It swings lethargically to his side. His body is ready to leave, to turn away, but his eyes are wide, moon-like, lost in her face, in that sleeping, emotionless, cold face of hers. He wants to scream at her, to scream until his throat burns, scream at her to wake up, to flutter her eyelids, to wiggle her toes, to twitch her lips. He wants to see that blue shine in her eyes, that beautiful blue. The blue in this room, the blue in that cage, is bad, hollow, unfeeling, **uncaring**. But _her_ blue is anything but.

 _Her_ blue is powder candy, her blue is vivid ocean, her blue is warm sympathy, her blue is perfect sky. Her blue is Nora blue, plain and simple.

And Nora blue, he remembers, is the best, most beautiful kind.

He wants to touch her, to be with her, to have her talk, to have her be _there,_ not a shell, not a shroud, not a ghost, but _there_ , as she once was.

So long ago.

 _Victor, I want a divorce._

 _What?_

 _You heard me. **Divorce.** I want one._

 _Oh, come on, Nora! Don't be ridiculous! You don't_ mean _that!_

 _Oh, but I do, Victor. I mean it with every fiber of my being._

He's almost ready to go, he _must_ be ready to go, he can't stay out for long, and yet he waits, staring at his wife awhile longer, just looking at her, lost in that face, screaming inside, screaming at her to stir, to shake, even if he knows that upon doing so she will die, will freeze instantly her containment chamber. Still, a part of him believes that she's still there, that there's still hope, if only because there _has_ to be hope, that she _has_ to be there. If only because all of this searching and digging and desperation couldn't have been for nothing.

If only because all his **work** couldn't have been for nothing.

 _I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for._

His breath shakes on the thick, heavy air.

 _No, Nora, wait!_

His chest rises. He inhales. It's like moving a mountain, doing this. His breath tastes bitter, like wet chalk, like deliquesced, sticky mud in a damp track of swamp grass.

 _I really, really do._

He exhales. It's the hardest part; the letting go. He whispers under his breath and looks at her for a second longer.

 _Wait!_

 _Stay away from me, Victor! Just stay the hell away!_

He holds that breath, locking it in his chest, sucking in his stomach, feeling his ribs poke and graze against his skin.

 _It's... it's blood. You're... Nora, you're_ bleeding. _Why are you_ bleeding _?_

 _Forget it. Forget it all. I'm leaving. I'm gone._

 _We... oh God, we have to get you to a hospital! Nora, wait! What the hell are you doing? You just coughed up_ blood! _You can't just walk away! No one just coughs up_ blood _! Listen to me! We have to get you to a hospital, we have to get you to a hospital right_ now _!_

 _Oh, so_ now _you care, huh?_ Now _you notice._

 _Nora, please, we don't have time for this!_

 _No._

 _No, t_ _hat's where you're_ wrong _, Victor._

Then he walks back to his suit.

 _There is no "we."_

And then he puts it back on.

I'm _the one have doesn't have time for this. In fact, I'm_ _the one who doesn't have any time at_ all _. You, however..._

He walks to the back of the room.

You _have all the time in the world._

And then he gets back to work.


	2. Monster

He likes this part.

It's dark, and the tang of sewer stench seems to stick to his heavy, iron-like skin like a wet T-shirt, and the meat—the raw, seeping meat—bobs slowly along the soiled walls, and he schleps through the green water, and every now and then something clumpy and hard meets his shins before breaking apart like a lump of grainy clay, and, oh yeah, he likes this part, he likes it a ton.

But then again, it's _always_ nice to be **home.**

When he was four—or was it five? he doesn't know, he can't remember, and he doesn't care—his aunt dropped him into a gutter in the middle of a particularly fussy storm that had started ripping through their neighborhood a few days before. She had him put him in a bag, a garbage bag, that was filled to the brim with all their collected tenement trash (sometimes, he can almost smell the sour tang of that bag, whenever he starts to go to sleep at night; can almost feel that hard, tough plastic, the durable canvass that confined him in there with all those crumbs and crushed cartons and used paper-towels) and it was with that trash that he went down into the guttering sewer. He had clawed his way out, though, popped open the bag with his fingers and then ripped the bag in two, before the water had rushed in around his ugly, deformed little and started to drown him.

And it _would_ have drowned him, too, if his aunt had been right in thinking he was only a monster because he _looked_ like a monster.

But, no, he was far more removed from the human race than in the regards of appearance. It turned out, in fact, that even his _lungs_ were monstrous, even his _pores_ were abnormal, twisted, _freaky._ And it went even beyond that, too. Living in those tunnels, and even fighting his way through all that junk in the rushing current of filth when he was four or five years old, it had taught him something, something a toddler could've understood given the right circumstances: it taught him about the evolutionary chain and, more than that, it taught him that what most people considered "evolved" was nothing compared to what _he_ could do.

Nothing compared to the joys he had known down here, where all impulses are placated, and all indulgences are accepted.

Where the primitive, snarling, hungry beast was fed.

He continues to wade through the current. Like that afternoon his aunt had disowned him, a storm brews overhead, on the ground, on the sidewalks of the city, disgorging its wreckage into his home, slowly flooding his natural habitat. He doesn't mind.

He likes this part.

Muffles come from deeper in the dark. Further along the sewer there are pipes and walkways, and tied to these pipes and lying on these walkways is more meat, only instead of the bobbing, disfigured carcasses flowing beside him, this meat is living, and it's pretty, and once it wakes, it'll scream and that, in a way, will be more enjoyable than the act of eating it; hearing it _protest,_ feeling it kick beneath him, its hands slapping desperately at his back...

In a way, that's the best part.

Or maybe what comes right before the feast is the best part, when the meat's pretty and young and open for business.

He smiles as he thinks about her. He wonders if she'll recognize him, if she'll know him from the stories and the newscasts and the headlines.

Probably not.

Probably she'll just see a monster, not a man, just a monster, like the kind you imagine is under your bed at night, or waiting just outside your window.

Because he's not like the others. _They_ all have gimmicks, costumes, make-up, distinctive features. When people look at _them_ , it's not too hard to pin down who they are, by the way they self-advertise, and monologue, and all that. The peacocks— _they_ like people to know who they are, because they think _they_ run Gotham, and they want people to know it.

They want people to _know_ who owns this city, and whose about to make them suffer and squeal and bend to their will because of it.

But not Waylon Jones.

He's just a monster.

He's just an **animal**.

And when she looks at him, when she sees his face, all scaled and scuted and otherworldly, _that's_ what she'll see.

That's **all** she'll see.

 _"Good_ ," he growls to himself as he goes, slushing through those rancid waters, shuffling down the narrow, ancient terrain, down among the unleashed foulness of the rotten trash, sniffing the underbelly of light and hope, naked and primal and hungry and excited, and the words float from his mouth and solidify over and over again in the filthy darkness. "That's just _perfect_."

Tomorrow, there will be more. There's a culvert, you see, at the end of these sewers, that dumps the waste of the current into the river, and the street-meat are always wandering around its mouth after a storm hits the neighborhood, and that's when he'll strike. That's when he'll get them, and drag them into his home.

And they'll all probably scream when he does.

 _That's good,_ he thinks _. Something has to be here. Something has to be under the bed, or just outside your window at night, or under the ground, just waitin' to grab your ankles as you walk by, just waitin' to make you hurt and beg and scream. Something has to be in here, cuz there no such thing as an imagination. There just ain't. It's all real. It's all completely_ real. _There's_ always _something in the dark,_ always _something fixin' to get you, to eat you up; there's always a monster in the shadows, and if you don't watch out, he'll get you and cut you and swallow you whole. And I'm livin' proof of that, if I'm nothing else._

So he goes on, and he smiles as he goes, and he hears the meat start to scream out from where she is on the walkway, and he hears her start to ask where she is, and if anybody's there, and he can't wait to have her, to rip her apart, to rend her taught, tight flesh

And then he stops.

Then, for just a moment, he stands there, no longer wading through the gunk, but just _standing_ in it, just staring into the black ahead, as a thought, as a _voice,_ catches him off-guard.

 _All you're proof of is what happens when a baby with crocodile lungs gets thrown into the sewer by his stupid bitch of an aunt._

And the voice—so sudden and clear and harsh and firm-toned—sends a chill up his back. In fact, it even kind of **scares** him.

And he grimaces at being afraid.

 _No_ , he points out to the thought, and his chapped, broken lips start to twitch. _I'm more than that. Much more. I'm the nightmare of every child, boy 'n girl, who wakes up sweating and yellin' for their mamma in the middle of the night. I'm the ghost story told around the camp fire, I'm the myth about gators beneath the Big Apple, I'm the killer of all killers, and nothing I've ever done is gonna make that any less true! I'm proof, and proof is all I'll ever be, and that's_ **ok _._**

He breathes, deeply.

He nods, to himself.

He grunts and shifts his body weight and closes his eyes and finds no voice left in his mind to argue back.

And then he continues to walk down the sewers towards the meat.

 _That's ok, cuz I like it,_ he thinks to himself. His voice is strong and authoritative and not to be doubted.

 _Yeah._

 _I like this part._

 _Hell._

 _I_ love _this part._


	3. Baby

" _Shhh_. It's ok. I'm here. _Shhh_. I'm here, baby, it's ok, everything's going to be ok, everything's going to be just **fine**. I'm here, I'm here now, it's been awhile, I know, but it's ok, it's all ok. _Shhh_."

A week ago, Pamela Isley said these words to a plant; the plant was dying, its tendrils drooping like depressed snake-heads, its roots withering like over-ripe grape vines, its pigment browning like the core of a rotten apple, and she knew that it—that _she;_ the plant was not an _it_ but a _she_ —needed Pamela to be there, beside her, in her final dying moments.

And she was right: it _had_ been awhile. In fact, it had been a full year. Far too long. The words should've came sooner, Pamela should've been here during it _all_ , during the whole illness, with the one she loved.

But she wasn't.

She was in Arkham. Locked in a cell. Her hand pressed to the thick, wire-reinforced, fiber-glass window built into the stone wall, looking down at the swaying little blades of grass on the lawn of that building's looming, monolithic façade, whispering to her babies, telling them that she would be free soon, that she would soon be with them in the sun, that their paradise was not yet lost, no yet, not while she still _lived._

Telling them that she would get out and make them all pay for what they've done.

And knowing that her babies could not hear her.

Knowing that they were just down there, crying, screaming for her, asking where their mother went.

But they could hear her _now_ , and a week ago, she had used her words to sooth one of her babies as the latter died, as she slowly fell over the rim of her little orange pot and lay in a black-brown leaf-veil of fetid, sour death, still, lifeless.

Pam had cried about that, after her baby died.

But she got over it.

That was something she _had_ to do. To mourn the loss of one baby for too long was unfair to the rest of them, the rest of her babies, who cried out for her attention, who needed their Mommy to help them reach the snug, cozy aura of the warm, healthy sun, so far above.

So, she buried her dead baby in the ground where she belonged and went back to work. Back to working on that paradise, that rich, fertile garden, that shining, eternal veld, free of man, free of selfish, self-indulgent, primitive little _men_ ; the men who'd just as soon as use you as they would love you, men who'd take your dream, take your _heart_ , and break its neck and skin its naive, useless coating of slim, aching flesh, and then hold it up to your face, and scream at you to look at it, to look at what your love was ever really worth to them, to look at what your dream had become.

The men who'd make a concept out of you, who'd make an _idea_ out of you, an _experiment_ out of you; men with big ideas and small hearts; men with fervent, burning ambitions and twisted little morals. Men who looked at you and only ever saw an opportunity, waiting to be fulfilled.

Pamela had been an opportunity, once before.

And ten years ago, she had promised herself she'd never be one again.

Oh, there were good ones, sure.

Just like bees: not all of them stung you when you got too close.

But all of them had the _ability_ to sting you, and that was always enough for Isley.

That was all she _needed_.

" _Shhh_. It's ok. I'm here. _Shhh_. I'm here, baby, it's ok, everything's going to be ok, everything's going to be just **fine**. I'm here, I'm here now, it's been awhile, I know, but it's ok, it's all ok. _Shhh_."

She says these words again now, in her green house, in her living room in the dead of night.

And while she is most definitely talking to her baby, and while her baby is most definitely in need of her words, she's not talking to a _plant_ this time.

No.

Right now, she's only talking to another fulfilled opportunity.

An opportunity, that has been fulfilled one too many times.

" _Shhh_ , Harl," she says, almost cooing. "It's ok. I'm here now. He's gone. It's just you and me. It's all ok. _Shhh_. It's ok."

And as she rubs her baby's back, and feels her hot, flushed, bruised face against the hollow of her shoulder, she smiles.

She smiles because, as of next week, the world will be a paradise.

A paradise, reserved only for her and her babies.


End file.
